The present invention relates to portlets and portal pages and more particularly to a method and system to deactivate and reactivate a portlet associated with a portal page or the like.
Portlets are a series of related tasks or portal applications presented to a user in a web page of a portal environment. A portal page may contain multiple portlets. Portlets are usually depicted as small boxes in a web page, portal or portal page. By default, portlets on a portal page may automatically pass content or data between each other to allow all portlets to synchronize the data they present based on an incident, event or task being performed. This behavior is in accordance with the standard Portal Development Model provided by portal servers such as the IBM Websphere® Portal or the like. Portlets are reusable components that may provide access to applications, web-based content, and other resources. Whenever a portlet is reused or used in conjunction with a different request or event selected by a user, the contents of the reused portlet may be changed and the original or preceding content, information or data is lost. This is particularly the case with a singleton portlet. A singleton portlet is a portlet that only exist once on a given portal page. If the portlet doesn't already exit on the page, the portlet is created and passed context or content, if needed or called for to be used with respect to a particular operation, event or task. If the portlet already exists on the portal page, context or data may be passed to it to carry out the particular event, operation or task. For example, an operator or user may select an event in an event viewer portlet of a portal page. Selecting the event may launch a singleton portlet to perform a particular function in conjunction with the event viewer portlet, such as an event properties portlet to show the event properties information associated with the selected event. If the operator or user now selects a different event in the event viewer portlet, the context or content of the event properties singleton portlet will change to show the event properties information associated with the newly selected event and the former context or content will be replaced and lost. Because the event properties portlet is a singleton portlet, a new event properties portlet is not launched in response to selection of the new event. There may be times, however, when preserving the data or information in a portlet, whether a singleton or not, may be desired. Additionally, preserving or freezing the data content of an individual portlet and changing the behavior of a portlet on a portal page may also be desirable under other circumstances, such as preserving data content across refreshes of the portal page, selectively toggling a portlet's ability to be targeted by a Portal Click-to-Action feature or similar circumstances. If a Portal Click-to-Action feature is enabled, a user can broadcast messages to all portlets on a portal page to further promote cooperation between the portlets but pre-existing content may be lost. In most cases, a user wants portlets to behave in this manner. However, under some circumstances, a user may want to freeze the content or deactivate a specific portlet and therefore does not desire this portlet behavior. Current portal server technology does not provide a means to avoid such behavior or to preserve or freeze content in a portlet.